Howdy,
I was speaking to my son about looking for a job and working in shipping.
I told him of a time when I was about his age and had a part-time job helping ship t-shirts out of the owner’s garage.
I had done this for a few years for another company so I was in very familiar territory.
In addition to me, there were other people that helped out for this small, family run, business.
I helped make some improvements to the workflow like we did at our other company (moving frequently ordered items close to the packing station, cutting off tops of boxes so we can easily reach inside, etc.)
I was informed that customers were frequently receiving the wrong items so the owner came up with a new policy. One person “picks” the order, the other verifies what is inside, seals it up, and initials its contents.
Not an unrealistic request and could help catch issues.
But it drastically slowed down our productivity.
You could rightfully argue “Joe, you were getting paid by the hour, what do you care about productivity?”
And I’ll have to say, at the time, I really didn’t think I could explain it to you.
I just knew that I was not the one pulling the wrong items.
One day we “got behind” so I decided to just pull them all, seal them up and ship them out.
Unfortunately for me the boss happened to come down that day and check in on us. She noticed my colleague hadn’t signed off on the packages and asked why not.
I just told her that I “knew” I was not the one pulling the wrong things.
She apologized to me but said the infamous Trump line: ” You’re fired❗”
I remember saying “that’s fine, I completely understand.”
I understood I had 💯% disobeyed her direct request and agreed she had full cause to fire me.
What I found interesting in retrospect that, even when I was ~19 years old, I had this “hard coded” passion for being productive.
How about you❓ Have you always wanted to save time?
Or is working smarter, not harder a new passion for you?
Now on with the show…
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Stop Micromanaging AI
A lot of people critique AI when they use it to do what they are experts in.
In this discussion we help solidify the point.
Why We Micromanage AI and How to Stop | Hero Extract
Then, in this video, we discuss doing a better job giving AI context and clear instructions.
Train AI With Your Hidden Preferences 🧠 | Hero Extract
Understanding Token Costs and Effort
If you’re baffled at understanding how you burn through tokens so fast, I 💯% don’t blame you❗
In this video we discuss approaches to keeping the context window as short as possible.
Medium Reasoning Mode Is All You Need 🎯 Stop Overpaying for AI | Hero Extract
Easily Jump To parts of your Registry
During a Hero call we came up with the idea of how to easily jump to parts of your registry.
You can see how it was figured out in this video.
After the call I had AI build RegJump.
Recreating Regjump with Custom Code | Hero Extract
Improving People’s Lives: Story #101
We were working with a remote client and he was not loving having to copy/paste things back and forth between us.
We have an internal tool that uses DropBox which allows us to copy/paste remotely but installing DropBox is a bit much to ask for clients. So I asked AI if we could use TailScale to be the “transporter”.
An hour later and we had a new tool that took no installation on client’s computers but I can copy and he can paste (and vice versa). Much more efficient! (btw I’m creating an App so I can also share the clipboard with my phone)
📚 What we’re reading
- Stop wasting your router’s USB port
- Some more great ideas with NFC tags
- Why pushing your router’s power button isn’t a real reboot
🤖 AI News that you Need to Know
- 5 Virtual Towns: One World Had 683 Crimes — And Another Was Just… Dead.
- MailSweeper is the inbox cleaner that clears years of clutter from busy Gmail accounts
- Workers In China Fear Being Replaced Amid Rising AI Impact On Jobs
- Clone yourself and watch you work with Munder Difflin
⚡️Productivity tips:
One of my new clients does not spend a lot of time on the computer so I “Rocked her world” by telling her about the clipboard history tool in Windows 11 by hitting Windows + V
How To Use Clipboard History in Windows 11 – Including Permanent Clipboard Items
🤣 A spot of Humor: So brutal❗
Ricky Gervais Brutally Tearing Down Celebrities To Their Face
What we 🅰utomated this week with AutoHotkey #145
Most of this week went into Rust.
An audio ripper with multi-threading and noise removal, a concept-search RAG system for chatting with local docs, and a media deduper that uses strata sampling to spot duplicate videos and audio fast enough to claw back hundreds of gigs.
I also fixed a license script that was tripping up 400+ downloads, pushed local transcription further with ASR and diarization, and switched the AI OCR tool to a single OpenRouter token so it can hit Claude and hundreds of other models.
In this week’s video I walk you through all of it, including the benchmarks where Rust image search went head to head with AutoHotkey and C++ (FindText) when I was rebuilding AutomateMyTask.
What we Automated this week #145
Clients say…
You guys changed my life! Thanks man — Marrion Mentoor
AHK Hero 🦸
Consider joining the 🦸Hero club! Members receive 25% off courses, consultations, tutoring, done for you project work, etc. Currently we have over 603 hours of recordings teaching AutoHotkey that is exclusive to Hero members❗
During this Friday’s call we’re planning to discuss:
- Help Hero Members with their Questions & Code
- AHK Tools
- Great discovery to get around install issues
- ClipshareTailScale / ClipShare from Coworkers
- OpenRouter Provisioning
- Claude Settings
- Creating v1 and v2 compatible scripts
- Borrowing Firefox Cookies
- Focus Guard
- Examples using AutoHotkey.dll
- WatchFolders example
- Rust Tools
- Unexpected benefit of using Rust
- Virtual Camera
- Updating Rust tools to provide Get Active Path with the path of the program
- Rust DLL
- FocusGuard (Prevent focus being stolen)
- PhoneDeck
- Progressive Web Apps
- ClipShare
- Song Sync
- Burgers and more
- HenHouse
They also have access to exclusive & pre-released content and 2 hours a week where we help people with their automation issues
🗣️ 💭 Quotable quotes
- Listen to something inspiring when you get up. It will change your day! — Joe Glines
- The towels were so thick there I could hardly close my suitcase — Yogi Berra
- Just do it. The meek may inherit the earth, but only after the bold are through with it — John Carlton
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the-Automator Dedicated to Multiplying your Income
Joe, Isaias, Irfan and staff
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P.S. Incidentally, regarding the intro, a couple of days after getting fired, I did hear from my work colleague.
They opened all of the orders I’d packed and confirmed they were all 💯% correct. 👀
